How Stuff Works - Article: Engineering of Roller Coasters

Roller Coasters

How Stuff Works - Roller Coaster on line Quiz Roller Coaster Engineering: Hand out paper and pencil copy for children to use as a research tool. They are give 30 minutes to research the questions in order to score more points.

Paper/pencil version from the online version. Have children work to research the answers and then go through the online version together.

Discovery Kids Roller Coasters

Glenco Online Roller coasters

Roller Coaster Math

A fifth grade/six grade class actively building and discussing roller coaster design and building.

Math Worksheet - Word Problems to illustrate:

Rollercoastermath.pdf

Materials List (Return to Contents)
Each group needs:

2-meter (6 foot) long foam tube (1/2" pipe insulation) cut in half lengthwise (Usually, one side of the tube comes perforated, making it easy to use scissors or a utility knife to cut through the perforation and the other side of the tube to form two halves, essentially making two long channels perfectly shaped to hold marbles; thus, one cut tube provides the track material for two groups; see Figures 1 and 2.)
glass marble
wooden marble
steel marble
paper or plastic cup
roll of masking tape
set of markers, crayons or pencils
blank sheet of paper
stopwatch
Roller Coaster Specifications Worksheet, one per student or one per group
Suggested Scoring Rubric, one per group

RollercoasterWS.pdf

Creating a Loop

Teach Engineering Roller Coaster Plan

Roller coaster demonstration, the cars move through two tracks. One is a straight track while the other has a loop. The track with the loop wins while the straight track doesn't end at the same time. Great for discussion.

After the first run, the demonstration shows how water remains in the cup while going around the loop. Explain...
Determining the drop distance preceding a loop. How much kinetic and potential energy is needed to get a car around the the 360 degree loop?